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newbgarden

Anyone else have trouble finding...

newbgarden
13 years ago

the different composts and vermiculite for SFG?

This is my first year with raised bed gardens, and I can say that I haven't done too well.

First, I used a nursery's own mix to fill it. I can't find a good enough mix of compost, or enough vermiculite (I recently bought 4 8qt bags of it, since that's all I can find).

My first bed did poorly and everything was stunted. After about a month, everything was stunted, not growing.

So, I made another box, and this one I filled with a mixture of miracle grow, peat, yard dirt, a bag of topsoil, and humus. I replanted some tomatoes in that and a batch of sweet potatoes, and now you can see a difference between the plants still in the old box vs the new box.

I am about to fill another box for a fall garden. Since I can only really find humus and cow manure for compost, I might try just those two, with peat and vermiculite and see how that works.

I had some individual small boxes that I made for the squash and melons. I have four two by twos, and I put them in the sunniest available spot and they seem to be doing well. I just picked my fist squash and zuke today, and I have two watermelons just started.

I'm still waiting on tomatoes, which, in the second box are only now starting to have a few blooms on them.

Anyway, I'm really horrible at math, so does anyone know how many 8qt bags of vermiculite is needed for one cubic foot of the stuff? I'm trying to calculate how much cubic feet of each component I need to fill the 4' x 4' x 6" bed.

Do you need 8 cubic feet total? 4 x 4 x .5 (1/2 foot) = 8 cubic feet. Is my math wrong?

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